This site uses cookies to deliver our services, improve performance, for analytics, and (if not signed in) for advertising. By using LibraryThing you acknowledge that you have read and understand our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Your use of the site and services is subject to these policies and terms.

elenchus: Unfinished Season is set in the 1950s in and around Chicago, but elsewise an interesting parallel to The Great Gatsby in terms of setting and basic plot: class and manners among the society elite, and a young man wrestling with changes in family, caste, and personal relations.… (more)

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

What's one to do in the wake of this incandescence? I disagree with Nabokov. This is brilliant (though so is Tender Is The Night). Thinking quite a bit today about Pound and Bunny (Wilson). What about Wharton and the Master - Henry James? All this re-imagining, all this space to plot a counter movement, a line of transgression. Prisms of nature are revealed. The viewer's eye is stimulated by money and possibility. The senses blurred in a haze of exhaust fumes and gin. My thinking of this novel now has been colored by Sarah Churchwell's thesis in careless people, that can't be helped. Despite our failures, there's always sex and strange lights. ( )

I don't think I can ever do justice to how I feel about this book. The first time I read those last few lines I just gaped at the page - what makes me do that anymore? Gatsby is at once so angry, bitter, and hopeful. Even though it seems to Nick that everything good has passed away, replaced with ostentatious wealth and idle pleasures or the seeking of them, and those who aren't a part of this game inevitably suffer for it, there is hope in Jay Gatsby. That's its futile doesn't take away from the power of it.

Fitzgerald's writing is immaculate, full of wordplay and suggestion, but never obscure. I love this book. ( )

Before starting this I was under the impression that it was a book I should have read as a kid, that had just slipped by for some reason... But I would have found it incredibly dull. Now I just found it a little dull. There were a fair number of highlight-worthy lines, though, and it is sort of poignant. ( )

full of characters sketched into place - more symbol than reality. it's not that i disliked them (i can deal with that, i'm not 9), it's that i did not care about them. at all. they are all so glaringly transparently not-real: daisy has a laugh that's "like money" so she's jazz age decadence, tom has cruel triceps or something so he's obviously the meanness of society. the characters do what fitzgerald wants. it's keats if keats had never met another person. i've read this a couple of times at this point and at no point has it ever clicked like - oh! this is why it's liked! not even for a second; it's all so *obvious*. the only character with a spark of life is jordan, but she couldn't save the book. ( )

This is the story of a rich man named Jay Gatsby who is trying to reach the love of his life - Daisy. The story is told by Nick - Gatsby's neighbor - who becomes his closest friend and confidant. Gatsby approaches Nick to have Daisy come his way so that he can reconnect with her. Gatsby is much wealthier than he was when he last saw Daisy, so he hopes this will attract her attention. Daisy is used to a life of privilege and she is now married to Tom to continue this way of life. Tom is not a faithful husband, and so Gatsby hopes this will lure her away from Tom.

In the end - the love triangle spirals out of control and has a tragic end. But I won't share with you what happens because you should read for yourself to find out.

I liked this book okay. I am not a huge fan of books from this period (gasp), but it wasn't terrible by any stretch of the means. I found Gatsby and Daisy shallow, and couldn't really muster up pity for either one of them in the end. Daisy especially seemed like a total flake and I found myself making faces and shaking my head on some of her lines in the book.

It isn't a long book, so I am glad I took the time to read it. Now I have. But I don't think this would be one I will be reading again. ( )

The Great Gatsby is a romance novel that written by American Author F.Scott Fitzgerald.This novel is talk about the New Yorker in 1900s.The Great Gatsby is a classic piece of American fiction. It is a novel full of triumph and tragedy.Nick Carraway is the narrator, or storyteller, of The Great Gatsby, but he is not the story's protagonist, or main character. Instead, Jay Gatsby is the protagonist of the novel that bears his name. Tom Buchanan is the book's antagonist, opposing Gatsby's attempts to get what he wants: Tom's wife Daisy.

The weakness of this book is they using the classic languange and a little difficult to understand.The weakness also about Gatsby affection to Daisy,He spends that money on lavish parties in the hopes that she will show up.When she finally spends time with him, for the first time in many years, he naively believes that she will leave Tom for him but,unfortunately she is not.

However,the strength of this book is the writer are using the unique title so the reader are feel sympathy and curious about it, also the characteristic about Jay Gatsby that teach the reader many lesson.

To conclude,this book is the very recommended book,especially High School students because Fitzgerald’s novel is a portal to the savage heart of the human spirit, and wonders at our enormous capacity to dream, to imagine, to hope and to persevere.

The great Gatsby is truly a romance book like no other.F.SCOTT.Switzgerald describing about the life of New Yorker in 1900s.This novel is very popular many students if high school are required by their teachers to read this book.The narrator of The Great Gatsby is a young man from Minnesota named Nick Carraway. He not only narrates the story but casts himself as the book’s author.As ive read about this book,Gatsby’s personality was nothing short of “gorgeous.”

moreover,the weakness about this book is hard to understand if u are not really pay attention on it.this novel is about a contradiction,Gatsby's idealism makes him blind.He doesn't see that Daisy can't have love and money, just money. Gatsby can't turn back time.He even doesn't see death coming toward him.

However,the strength of this book something quite different from others,it is the charm and beauty of writing,has many important meanings that should be learned early on in life.

To conclude,what i can say is don't be too obsessed just because you have so much money,money ain't last forever.but overall its a magnificent,fantastically, entertaining and enthralling story.

I find Gatsby aesthetically overrated, psychologically vacant, and morally complacent; I think we kid ourselves about the lessons it contains. None of this would matter much to me if Gatsby were not also sacrosanct.

There is the convoluted moral logic, simultaneously Romantic and Machiavellian, by which the most epically crooked character in the book is the one we are commanded to admire. There’s the command itself: the controlling need to tell us what to think, both in and about the book. There’s the blanket embrace of that great American delusion by which wealth, poverty, and class itself stem from private virtue and vice. There’s Fitzgerald’s unthinking commitment to a gender order so archaic as to be Premodern: corrupt woman occasioning the fall of man. There is, relatedly, the travesty of his female characters—single parenthesis every one, thoughtless and thin. (Don’t talk to me about the standards of his time; the man hell-bent on being the voice of his generation was a contemporary of Dorothy Parker, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf, not to mention the great groundswell of activists who achieved the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Yet here he is in A Short Autobiography: “Women learn best not from books or from their own dreams but from reality and from contact with first-class men.”)

It is an impressive accomplishment. And yet, apart from the restrained, intelligent, beautifully constructed opening pages and a few stray passages thereafter—a melancholy twilight walk in Manhattan; some billowing curtains settling into place at the closing of a drawing-room door—Gatsby as a literary creation leaves me cold. Like one of those manicured European parks patrolled on all sides by officious gendarmes, it is pleasant to look at, but you will not find any people inside.

Indeed, The Great Gatsby is less involved with human emotion than any book of comparable fame I can think of. None of its characters are likable. None of them are even dislikable, though nearly all of them are despicable. They function here only as types, walking through the pages of the book like kids in a school play who wear sashes telling the audience what they represent: OLD MONEY, THE AMERICAN DREAM, ORGANIZED CRIME.

A curious book, a mystical, glamourous story of today. It takes a deeper cut at life than hitherto has been enjoyed by Mr. Fitzgerald. He writes well-he always has-for he writes naturally, and his sense of form is becoming perfected.

Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her; If you can bounce high, bounce for her too, Till she cry "Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover, I must have you!"—Thomas Parke D'Invilliers

Dedication

ONCE AGAINTOZELDA

First words

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

Quotations

Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.

All right ... I'm glad it's a girl. And I hope she'll be a fool—that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.

This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens, where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight.

"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me. "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."

I rented a house ... on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of new york -- where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and seprated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They are not perfect ovals ... but their physical resembalnce must be a source of perpetual wonder to the gullsthat fly overhead.

. . . he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts,breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about . . . like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - they smashed things up and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made...

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning —

"I'm thirty," I said. "I'm five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor."

And I like large parties. They're so intimate. At small parties their isn't any privacy.

“If it wasn’t for the mist we could see your home across the bay," said Gatsby. "You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock."

Daisy put her arm through his abruptly, but he seemed absorbed in what he had just said. Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.

Last words

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Wordsworth Classics publication of "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald, KS3 Success Workbook Maths Levels 5-8, and "Driving Democracy: Do Power-Sharing Institutions Work?" by Norris, Pippa were falsely combined. This seemed to be driven by the ISBNs.

In 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald announced his decision to write "something new--something extraordinary and beautiful and simple + intricately patterned." That extraordinary, beautiful, intricately patterned, and above all, simple novel became The Great Gatsby, arguably Fitzgerald's finest work and certainly the book for which he is best known. A portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess, Gatsby captured the spirit of the author's generation and earned itself a permanent place in American mythology. Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald's--and his country's--most abiding obsessions: money, ambition, greed, and the promise of new beginnings. "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning--" Gatsby's rise to glory and eventual fall from grace becomes a kind of cautionary tale about the American Dream.

It's also a love story, of sorts, the narrative of Gatsby's quixotic passion for Daisy Buchanan. The pair meet five years before the novel begins, when Daisy is a legendary young Louisville beauty and Gatsby an impoverished officer. They fall in love, but while Gatsby serves overseas, Daisy marries the brutal, bullying, but extremely rich Tom Buchanan. After the war, Gatsby devotes himself blindly to the pursuit of wealth by whatever means--and to the pursuit of Daisy, which amounts to the same thing. "Her voice is full of money," Gatsby says admiringly, in one of the novel's more famous descriptions. His millions made, Gatsby buys a mansion across Long Island Sound from Daisy's patrician East Egg address, throws lavish parties, and waits for her to appear. When she does, events unfold with all the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama, with detached, cynical neighbor Nick Carraway acting as chorus throughout. Spare, elegantly plotted, and written in crystalline prose, The Great Gatsby is as perfectly satisfying as the best kind of poem.

Jay Gatsby had once loved beautiful, spoiled Daisy Buchanan, then lost her to a rich boy. Now, mysteriously wealthy, he is ready to risk everything to woo her back. This is the definitive, textually accurate edition of a classic of twentieth-century literature, The Great Gatsby. The story of the fabulously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan has been acclaimed by generations of readers. But the first edition contained a number of errors resulting from Fitzgerald's extensive revisions and a rushed production schedule.… (more)